eligion, and perhaps
of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of
the _beyond_, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have
given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and
outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher
instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an
extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language,
the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring
this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our
minds. Religious Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise
the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more
generally, as _the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the
immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the
temporal_. Our consciousness of the beyond is, I say, the raw material
of all religion. But, being itself formless, it cannot be brought
directly into relation with the forms of our thought. Accordingly, it
has to express itself by symbols, which are as it were the flesh and
bones of ideas. It is the tendency of all symbols to petrify or
evaporate, and either process is fatal to them. They soon repudiate
their mystical origin, and forthwith lose their religious content.
Then comes a return to the fresh springs of the inner life--a revival
of spirituality in the midst of formalism or unbelief. This is the
historical function of Mysticism--it appears as an independent active
principle, the spirit of reformations and revivals. But since every
active principle must find for itself appropriate instruments,
Mysticism has developed a speculative and practical system of its
own. As Goethe says, it is "the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic
of the feelings." In this way it becomes possible to consider it as a
type of religion, though it must always be remembered that in becoming
such it has incorporated elements which do not belong to its inmost
being.[7] As a type of religion, then, Mysticism seems to rest on the
following propositions or articles of faith:--

First, _the soul_ (as well as the body) _can see and
perceive_--[Greek: esti de psyches aisthesis tis], as Proclus says.
We have an organ or faculty for the discernment of spiritual truth,
which, in its proper sphere, is as much to be trusted as the organs of
sensation in theirs.

The second proposition is that, since we can only know what